You only fail when you stop trying by Jeremy M. Talbott

When deciding on my first column I tried to decide which part of training would be best to try and assimilate into a real life situation.  After much trial and tribulation I decided that failure was the best.  Now for most people in martial artist failure is something that rarely comes up.  I mean, whenever you test you are guaranteed to succeed.  It is what most schools try to pass off as "self esteem".

This is really a very sad fact about the martial arts.  We claim to teach life skills, but if you are trying to protect your students from failure are we actually teaching life skills?  So many people look at failure as a negative aspect of life, but in fact it is one of the most positive things that could happen to a person.  Even Thomas Edison once said "I have not failed; I have found 10,000 ways that won't work."  Now for many of the instructors out there I'm sure you are ready to scream and shout how failing a student would totally traumatize a student from ever wanting to lean martial arts again.

Come on folks, you know as well as I do that if you fail a student they will not be totally traumatized from ever doing martial arts again.  If they are, then you as an instructor failed way before the testing ever began.  Let's face it, when our students leave our studio they will be challenged in school, home, and work.  What if they fail that challenge? Have we really taught them anything? 

Failure is just as much as part of life as success.  Failure is the fire that forges our armor of strength.  Once we teach the true concepts of failure we, as instructors, can finally show that success is an actual accomplishment.  I have seen way too many black belts that frankly don't deserve them.  When I asked the instructors why they say always say the same thing. "They have improved much more than what they used to be like in the beginning."  Well that is great, but are they doing the technique correctly?  If they are not then how can you say they are passing?  This same concept would never relate to the real world.  If you don't know that 3+3=6 then giving any answer is still wrong, not matter how much improvement you had made to achieve the answer.

Eventually the student has to realize that even if they do their best, that sometimes it is just not enough.  When this happens, it is up to the instructor to let them know why they didn't succeed and what they need to do in order to pass the next time.  What happens in this process is that the student learns from their mistakes and finds out how they can better themselves to succeed the next time around.  When is all said and done at the end of the test the instructor must remember on key concept Character is not built upon success.  It is built upon the failures that lead to success.